Culture Exil

About the organisation

Basic details : Culture-exil is a cultural association with a humanitarian objective: to enhance the visibility of people in situations of exclusion by creating socially committed artistic works arising from the encounter between artists and territories inhabited by poorly represented or under-represented populations. These encounters lead to the creation of audiovisual, literary, theatrical or visual works that aim to revitalize traditional modes of representation by giving faces and voices to isolated persons or communities.

Mission : Its objective is to gain a territorial foothold. Culture-exil considers culture as a powerful vehicle for social representations. Many populations nowadays are victims of stigma, isolation, racism, sexism and exclusion. This marginalisation is reproduced on the Western cultural scene where they are in the minority, sometimes poorly represented or exclusively perceived as victims. After identifying the issues specific to a forgotten population and its territory, the Culture-exil team carries out research on the territorial network and meets the main actors so that the artist can be fully integrated on the ground and his/her practice understood by the concerned persons. Field research is carried out over the long term in order to give the artist time for the encounter and to deconstruct his/her own prejudices. In this way, Culture-exil seeks to foster artistic works that are liberated, insofar as possible, from conventional modes of representation, avoiding the pitfall of victimisation.

Vision : To bring people who are forgotten to the attention of the general public. The Culture-exil team is not only committed to creating the best possible conditions for the encounter between an artist and a territory, but also to developing a broad dissemination of works to the general public. By highlighting these territories, it seeks to raise public awareness of their causes and to foster new encounters, which will constitute a further step in the fight against exclusion and poverty. Part of the profits made from the dissemination of the works will be returned to the actors in these territories, the rest being reinvested in new projects.